Gust Front

* * *

Specialist Nick Warren crouched in his foxhole and tried to count kills. The foxhole had been built for interlocking fire, with a mound of earth in front of it and the firing slot angled out to the right at a forty-five degree angle. The idea was to fire at everything from the side and not be shot at by the horses you were shooting at. Which was fine except that the whole wall was being hammered by railgun and shotgun rounds. Dirt drifted around him in streams as the pounding fire tore apart the sandbags on the outer layer, then began to destroy the packed dirt of the fill.

His zone of fire was packed with horses. There were so many that he had stopped bothering to aim. If he missed one the bullet was sure to hit the one behind. He would run but he had done that once and knew what it brought. The horses could run you down faster than you could escape. There was nothing to do but kill them and keep killing them and hope it was enough. He had to keep them off the other holes and hope that there were enough guys left to keep the horses off his. He wished he'd saved some grenades, they'd be a treat. But he was out of gun grenades and the hand kind both.

His bolt flew back on an empty chamber and the plastic magazine dropped out. He was patting his ammo pouches trying to find another magazine when he heard a sound like a machete hitting a watermelon and looked over his shoulder.

The other soldier in the foxhole was down, half her face torn away by the railgun round that had finally punched through the wall of sandbags. He couldn't even remember her name, some chick from headquarters company. He had a moment of shame at his first thought, which was joy that he could see she had two magazines left. But he didn't have much time to dwell on the shame. There was a sudden shower of dirt, heavier than the earlier ones. He never even saw the blade that clove into the back of his head, slicing through the Kevlar helmet, bone and brain like butter.

* * *

There just wasn't enough concentrated firepower. Fighting Posleen had often been described as trying to stop an avalanche with a fire hose. It only works if you have enough fire hoses.

The Posleen were on a narrow front, crossing an open beaten zone. They were, in fact, a perfect target for a prepared veteran unit with backup or even an intact, dug in, green ACS unit. But without massive artillery fire, without an intact ACS battalion, without more troops and tangle-foot and barbwire and mines, Ardan'aath drove his forces forward in a wild charge that overwhelmed the defenders in bare minutes.

Bravo Company of the ACS was the first to fall, left exposed on the flank of the mechanized company. Their lines of silver lightning stretched out to the charging Posleen and tore them apart like paper. The same carnage would have shocked a human force into immobility. But there were over twelve thousand Posleen charging down the narrow front and dozens of God Kings. And Posleen just don't stop.

The Posleen focused on this danger first, striking the company with direct-fire. The armor was usually proof against anything but a plasma ca

The dug-in forces fared better, but not so much that it mattered. The first to be silenced was the partially dug-in Charlie Company as their grav-guns and Grim Reapers were picked out for special attention by the heavy weapons of the Posleen brigade. Charlie Company put up a hard fight but the whistling centaurs drove forward against the wall of fire, piling up windrows of their dead in an effort to close with the armored humans. It finally came down to hand-to-hand as the Posleen reached the foxholes of the unit and overwhelmed it in a charge with monomolecular blades.

In the meantime the lighter railguns and shotguns of the Posleen normals concentrated on the foxholes of the mechanized unit, in most cases hammering them so hard they were unable to respond. Anyone who jumped out of a hole and started to run was cut apart by massed fire. When the Posleen reached the firing line it was all over. The forlorn troopers were butchered in place like so many sheep. A few made it away in the confusion, but for all practical purpose the unit had ceased to exist.

* * *

«We ca

«Ardan'aath will dispose of them in good time,» said Kenallai calmly. «Look at the thresh run,» he continued, gesturing at the schematic. The remnants of the Tenth Corps were pulling up stakes and backpedaling towards Manassas as fast as they could. «Like abat from a corpse.»

«We should press them,» said Kenallai. «We must not let them stop and build defenses before the great prize to the north.»

«We will, my eson'antai, we will,» the oolt'ondar said, fluffing his crest. «Don't be so envious.»

Kenallai turned away at that insight, tapping the display to bring it wider. This was a fine land, rich and with much booty to be won. There would be fine fiefs to be had. If only the Net recognized his contributions.

In the distance there was an end to the screaming and a fading sound of diesel engines.

CHAPTER 57

Rabun County, GA, United States of America, Sol III

0446 EDT October 11th, 2004 ad

Cally rubbed the orange solvent into the Cordura nylon, trying to get the last stains out. «I wish those white-suits had stayed around long enough to clean this stuff.»

Papa O'Neal chuckled, working a bit of bone out of a crevice. They had both taken fast showers to get the bits of the late Harold Locke off, but the armor had picked up quite a bit of evidence. Getting it cleaned up was a priority.

«Yeah, well, I guess we're just going to have to use a little elbow grease.» He took a puff off his pipe and scrubbed at another spot of blood.

«Who do you think they were, really?» she asked in a serious tone.

He stopped looking for spots on the black cloth for a moment and leaned back. It was a good question. «Honey, I don't rightly know. They were obviously here to save our bacon. Now, I've got a lot of friends in the business, but nobody that could call up a team like that. And they knew Harold was coming to call. Now, they might have figured on being able to cover things up so whoever sent him didn't figure out what happened. That's more or less what happened. If the question gets bandied around we can take quiet credit for it.

«But that still begs the question of who sent 'em.»

She nodded her head and went back to working, but he could tell from the expression on her face she was thinking about something. «Pe

«I think it was somebody that thought they owed Daddy a favor.»

He started to open his mouth to dismiss the suggestion and stopped. Mike Junior had told him about the present of the combat suit. At half a billion credits, one of the suits was, to say the least, no small gift. Somebody who thought they owed him a half-billion-credit suit might think they owed him a quick response from a special actions team. Instead of dismissing the thought he nodded his head in agreement. «Okay, I can buy that.»

She nodded in turn and picked up the toothbrush as a sonic boom hit.